5 Tips for Greener, Environmentally Sustainable Cleaning

While most of the conversations here at Stonyfield seem to center around delicious organic food, we do get to other things – including exchanging tips on how to live a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. Recently, a few of us started sharing some of our favorite green cleaning tips, which inspired me to dig around for more from the pros. Behold, five awesome tips for greener cleaning you’ve just gotta try.

Just add vinegar

This isn’t groundbreaking news for most people, but vinegar is downright amazing for around the house uses. For example, if you’d rather not be engulfed in the fumes of tub and tile cleaner, clean up your grimy tub by wiping it down with a vinegar soaked cloth and rinsing it with water. Boom. Clean tub. (For these 100 other uses for vinegar, I recommend buying in bulk.)

Ready to up your vinegar game?

Mix it with rubbing alcohol, water and a few drops of essential oil (here’s a handy recipe to follow) in a spray bottle for smudge-free window and mirror cleaning.

Take a seat

Finding ready-made, eco-friendly upholstery cleaners and protectors has been an ongoing challenge for me – especially with two little ones. But we’ve found that eco-friendly dish soap (mixed with hydrogen peroxide for even tougher stains like red wine) works really well in a pinch. We usually mix the soap with water to make bubbles and just blot the bubbles on the stain with a towel.

Hit the decks

Here’s an amazing tip I haven’t tried yet, but with our house on the market, we need our beautiful floors to shine, so I’ll be boiling up some tea before the week is out. Dampen a cloth in strong tea, wash the floors and watch them sparkle thanks to the tea’s tannic acid.

Clear the air

Keeping your house clean is about more than scrubbing up messes. One of the easiest, greenest things you can do to keep your environment friendly to live in is open the windows and let the fresh air flow.

Do you have a green cleaning tip you thing we’ve just gotta try? Post it in the comments below for a chance to win 10 coupons for free cups of #StonyfieldGreek! We’ll choose a winner by Monday, February 10, 2014.